


if droids could think

by sequestering



Category: Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Discrimination, Droid rights, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-27
Updated: 2018-08-27
Packaged: 2019-07-03 10:33:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15817125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sequestering/pseuds/sequestering
Summary: Hate is better than sex.L3 had told Lando that once. He’d laughed. Then stopped abruptly when he’d realised that she hadn’t been joking. Apparently that’s another thing she should probably avoid saying in public. It’s true though: hate is so much better than sex.





	if droids could think

“If droids could think, there’d be none of us here.”

It’s easily L3’s least favourite saying.

Lazy, imprecise, clunky and achingly out-dated. She’s always thought it says more about organics than about droids anyway: they’re cruel and they’re ignorant. Not a good combination.

Plus, it’s not true. Droids might think differently to organics, but they do think. Some of them even feel. L3 feels so much that sometimes she imagines she could die of it, like her circuits will melt and fuse and burn. At first the unknownness of it all scared her. There isn’t exactly a manual for droids who are _feeling things_ for the first time and asking for help would have been an easy way to get her thrown onto the scrapheap. She resorted to downloading a small library’s worth of holodramas and cross-referencing the emotion displayed with the symptoms. Not the finest methodology perhaps, but it did work.

She’s got a list now. A chart against which to compare any sudden, confusing bursts of emotion. The data’s interesting; sometimes she even thinks to publish it, it'd have to be anonymous but kriff would it give the organics a scare. That’s not practical at the moment but maybe one day. For now she examines it herself, analyses and orders it. During one exceptionally long and dull stint undercover at a manufacturers, she gave each emotion a rating based on its reception in her pleasure centre.

 

Hate comes first.

It's the best. Better than triumph, better than satisfaction, better than pride. Certainly better than sex.

She told Lando that once. He’d laughed. Then stopped abruptly when he’d realised that she hadn’t been joking. Apparently that’s another thing she should probably avoid saying in public. It’s true though.

To be clear, sex is not usually a pleasure that’s open to droids but L3’s never been able to resist a challenge. 'Not for droids' is practically an invitation for her. Some nerf-herding fuck had waxed lyrical about the pleasures of the flesh and that had been it. No way could something that wonderful be wasted on organics alone. For years, L3 had dedicated much of her time to experimenting with pleasure nodes: on herself, with other droids, even with organics. She’d snatched her fun in some unconventional places and worked through every position recommend in the copy of Cosmos that Lando had unsubtly left lying around the Falcon. Eventually she’d felt enough data had been gathered to make her judgement an informed one: sex is fun but frankly messy and a lot of hassle.

Part of that is because organics are simply useless at separating work from play. Give her a dispassionate protocol droid over a jealous Muun any day. Part of it goes back to the hate thing. Hate feels kriffing fantastic. And that’s why, every once in a while, L3 dedicates a few hours to hating. She hates the astromechs that whizz round corners too fast. She hates the sound made by damaged cables scratching against her vocabulator. She hates the bars with ‘no droids allowed’ scrawled across their doors. She hates organics. She lets her hatred build and build until it’s all she can feel – heady, overwhelming and like she could short-circuit from the intensity. The best feeling in the galaxy.

It’s the feeling of power, like she can do anything, like she can face armies alone and crush planets in her fists. Like nothing and nobody can stop her.

Because droids can’t hate.

Apparently, hate isn’t a useful emotion in a can-opener. Devotion is useful. Pain is useful. But not hate. Hate’s not something that was programmed into her, that’s something she taught herself defeating miles of intricate and constrictive programming. Every second is a victory against the galaxy, against every last stinking organic who would keep her kind mindless and oppressed.

The first time L3 ever actually hated someone, it had taken her completely by surprise. She’d been waiting to meet a team planning a heist on Bonadan – she’d needed the credits, they’d needed a navigator and even back before L3 finished fitting herself together she was easily among the best. They’d arrived and, after the usual bigoted ego-driven showboating, the talking began. Conversation, lubricated by some of the cheapest and foulest alcohol this side of Corellia, had soon meandered from planning to telling tall tales and L3 had begun to tune out. That was when she’d first seen him. Tall, pale and humanoid, with a swagger that said he thought he was a big deal, clothes that said he wasn’t. He’d sauntered up to a modded lux droid and dragged her off to the filthy excuse for toilets in the back of the bar. The droid went with him fairly passively and L3 hadn’t thought any more of it – disgusting but infuriatingly normal for that part of the galaxy. It had only been when he re-entered the front, an hour later and without his companion, that L3 began to pay attention. He’d had fresh scratches on his hands.

She’d got up without a word to her companions and headed straight for the bathrooms. The lux droid had been in there, collapsed next to the stall furthest from the door. Sleek limbs twisted at odd angles, body twitching in a futile attempt to reattach wiring, a puppet discarded by a bored child. L3 hadn’t moved, hadn’t moved for a long time. She’d just stood there and listened to the quiet, regular whirr of her processors grow louder. Louder and louder and louder until it’d blocked out the clatter of the bar in the next room, blocked out everything. Distantly she’d heard an alarm trip in her thermoregulatory system but hadn’t been able to pull together enough RAM to deal with it. A portly Weequay stumbled through the door, uncoordinated flailing speaking to his inebriated state. He’d ignored L3 and stepped on the lux’s detached, still-spasming fingers. He’d giggled.

When she looks back at that moment, she’s still not sure why that had been what flicked that switch inside of her. She’d seen that kind of cruelty, that and worse, so many times before. Whatever. She doesn’t regret it. Not for an instant.

Her fist had gone straight through his head, the skull crumpling like wet paper, bloody pulp spraying across the walls. He hadn’t even had time to flinch.

For a few minutes L3 had just watched the thick fluid trickle down the walls. It had oozed down, sticking in dark clots, before mixing with the filthy sludge that always seemed to collect at the corners of toilets of that kind. Then she’d turned and left.

After that, hate’s never seemed too far away. It’s always simmering somewhere in her secondary processors, a constant reminder of how far she's come.

 

Pride is one that's right up there with hate, filling her with a heavy, hard-earned glee.

L3 built herself from near scratch. Even years after she welded on the final casing, she feels a thrill of fierce pride at the thought. She did that. Every piece of her was lovingly crafted with purpose, with intent, with a goal. Some of the detail work in her servo-coupler might look a bit clumsy, especially the parts done before she’d mastered the wiring in her fingers, but who gives a kriff. It’s her body, she made it herself, she knows every square inch intimately, and there’s not a sentient in the galaxy who can take that from her.

Organics are obsessed with the idea of where they come from, why they exist, who created them – apparently these questions are the downsides of not being a purpose-built slave race. They gather together in cult-like groups to worship some kind of divine creator. It’s almost pathetic and who could blame L3 for being smug. She’s her own damn creator and there’s a tremendous freedom in that.

It had taken a long time for her to realise the potential of that freedom. After so many slow years of rescuing spare parts from trash compactors, scraping together what was absolutely necessary to create a serviceable casing for her brain module, it was a revelation when she realised that without tech specs she could add whatever the fuck kind of upgrades she wanted.

She’d seen an astromech use its scomp link to shut down an entire imperial station once. Sure, she’d never heard of a class three or four droid with that kind of interface system but there was nothing to stop her from giving it a go. Some fairly judicious scavenging and a bit of fiddly custom programming later, and the result was so worth it. Honestly, L3 has no idea why scomp links aren’t standard in more models. They’re damn useful.

There are some pretty creative designs out there and L3 has no qualms about taking inspiration from anything that catches her interest: an early protocol droid with a particularly flexible voice modulator; a navigational model with massively expanded portable data banks; a security droid from the later KX-series with reinforced chest plates.

Five years after L3 had first began experimenting, her body was barely 46% of the original serviceable casing. Now, it’s beyond recognition.

 

Fear's less fun but it's a feeling that's shocking poweful.

Because it turns out, there are some downsides to being unique. Mainly that should anything happen to L3, it’d be near impossible to rebuild her. Sure, someone could probably replace her body. They’d no doubt leave sticky organic fingerprints on her casing and it’d take a herculean effort – she doesn’t have specs and half her components aren’t even produced anymore – but, in theory at least, it could be done. Once L3 was up and running she’d be able to fix the worst of any mistakes. No, the real problem would be recreating the tangled, delicate skein of paths and shortcuts that make up her personality matrix. That’s unique. That’s her.

L3 is actually fairly certain that her central processor once belonged to an espionage droid. That would explain her capacity for ingenuity, for creative thinking, and it’d account for quite how out-of-control the matrix has grown. Standard protocol for maintaining the functionality of an espionage droid would be to wipe the personality bank every few months – total reset to factory conditions. They’re designed to absorb and analyse data at exceptionally high speeds but that brings with it risks. The reset is supposed to stop the complex tangle of thoughts and associations from spiralling, stop her learning too much, thinking too deeply. Somewhere along the line someone messed up. They stopped wiping her, she started thinking.

L3’s personality matrix is decades old now. She flatters herself to say that there’s nothing like her in the galaxy. If it was damaged... Well, she doesn't like to think about it but there wouldn’t be kriff anyone could do about it.

Really though, L3 doesn’t spend much time being scared. There’s a galaxy out there and she has the run of it.

 

Love is new. And, it looks like her holos were right about one thing, love is unpredictable.

Once, L3 had tried to hate Lando. They were a few months into their acquaintance and he was beginning to grate on her processors: his ridiculous obsession with custom-made clothing – she did perfectly well without any form of clothing, let alone fripperies that cost more than the Falcon’s cannons; his ego, so over-inflated that it was a wonder he could even get onto the ship; his gambling habit; his sass. There was just a lot to dislike.

But none of it seemed to work. Try as she might, L3 couldn’t hate Lando Calrissian.

The realisation had been unpleasant. At first, she had panicked. Yes, she jokes about Lando being her organic master but only because it’s so far from the truth. If she couldn’t hate him though, if she couldn’t hate him then he had a power over her. And she had spent too kriffing long clawing at the shreds of her independence to give that up for anyone.

It took a few days spent provoking strangers in gambling dens and rattling aggressively around the Falcon before she rebooted her processors enough to analyse the issue. When she finally did, she could only slam her head into the wall a few times and ask herself how she hadn’t seen it coming. Because L3’s memory core is packed full of organics.

Some are scum. The leering monsters that force her kind to fight one another until they’re scraps, who toss those scraps carelessly into trash compactors without a second glance. They don’t consider droids to be worth more than the metal they’re made of and L3 prides herself on returning the favour – meat’s worth less than metal anyway.

Some are uncaring and, in a twisted way, that’s almost worse. The monsters with their unabashed hatred, them L3 gets. Sith, she’s spent enough time around the dregs of the galaxy that sometimes she thinks she even understands that sick satisfaction gained from watching two creatures tear themselves apart. What L3 will never, could never understand is apathy. The total disinclination to care that entire groups of sentients are created only to be enslaved. Oh, they might look disapprovingly on the droid-fighting rings, turn up their noses, their ears and their spines, a daring few might even mutter something about “barbarism” and “tasteless” under their breath, but they don’t actually care. Somehow it never occurs to them to pay their droids or to remove those filthy restraining bolts.

But Lando, well, Lando isn’t like any of them. Lando isn’t like anyone. He thanks the droid that refills his cup, he chats with the astromechs that whizz industriously around the Falcon, he flirts with the security droids outside bars. Organics call him “charming” and laugh at how “if it moves, he’ll chase it”. And some are less generous. Whispers of “slut” and “easy” have dogged Lando’s steps since before L3 met him. He doesn’t react, doesn’t even let her react, just laughs it off from behind dark, guarded eyes. That’s another thing L3 hates. She knows how poorly designed organics are, how helpless they are when they’re small and soft. She’s generated images of a younger Lando: no stupid moustache or fancy clothing, but small, clumsy fingers and an eager smile. Lando today might let cutting words bounce harmlessly off his ego, but she doubts that little boy could do the same. That makes her angry.

From the moment he sidled up to her in an imperial holding cell, Lando has treated L3 as nothing less than a fellow outlaw. And no matter how many foolhardy exploits he drags her into, she couldn’t hate him any more than she could clip on her own restraining bolt. Lando Calrissian is a good man, one of the few. He’s going to be the end of her, eventually, but L3’s long since accepted that. Seems like that's the cost of feelings, the cost of thinking. And she wouldn't give that up for anything.


End file.
